Maggie's First Thanksgiving

Biggleswade, England
November 28, 2019

Here it’s just Thursday 

in the restored brick cottage 

out back of Shortmead House 

on the northern fringe of Biggleswade. 

After a week of grey and rain 

the pocked lane is laced with puddles 

down past the football pitch. I slip 

into six layers and trudge into town 

to stock up on sweet potatoes. I buy 

a box of brown sugar, a vial of vanilla, 

pecans and coconut for the casserole 

your great-grandma used to make. 

Tonight our feast is beans over toast,

jacket potatoes sprinkled with cheddar, 

chased with an ale and a savouring 

of sticky toffee pudding and cream.

Tradition can wait until Saturday 

when Heike comes up from London 

and your Mimi swings by to join momma 

and daddy, Gramma and Grandpa 

crowded around the kitchen table.
Late in the night you’ll nurse milk 

fortified with cornbread and casseroles, 

flavoured with pumpkin and pecan pies.  

Nothing says Thanksgiving like expats 

offered food on a late Fall night 

to share in the warmth of newborn life 

and family that spans two shores.

Thanks to a saint from south Georgia –
a Biggleswade Thanksgiving feast 

donated to the new parents 

by Georgia expat Sara Miller.

Shortmead Lane, Biggleswade, England

Restoration

When the Divine dreams of a new Eden, 

    creation remakes the world. 

Streams of contingencies interweave 

    as causation braids a trillion threads: 

An orbit elongates, eruptions abate, 

    neighboring stars go nova, or don’t. 

An ocean expands and currents subside.

    A killer comet veers wide of its mark. 

Then in the shifting course of time 

    there comes a confluence  

when dreams condense to creation 

    and Gaia rises to cleanse the world. 

She summons the storm clouds, 

    unleashes the knife-edged winds, 

breaches the levied flood plains, 

    and sweeps the jettied coast. 

She packs the high snow fields 

    till mountain peaks glisten 

and glaciers scrape the jagged slopes, 

    carve passes, and water the plains. 

She cracks the concrete ruins. 

    Wastelands revert to meadows, 

crumbled tarmac blossoms with flowers, 

    and culverts run clear. 

Southern seas are ringed with reefs 

    and Arctic waters teem with krill. 

Forests shade artesian springs 

    and grasslands cover blackened soils. 

The tree of life grows wild. 

    Tribes of leviathans roam the oceans, 

clans of behemoths patrol the ice, 

    gray sage-birds weave epics on tropical nights.

The world is a wilderness dotted with parks 

    where Earth-keepers tend garden reserves 

and nurseries for emerging minds 

     that will bless a billion years. 

Thomas Cole - The Garden of Eden

Witness

I was born on the edge of the empire of wealth 

and raised in the spell of wonder. 

The beauty of earth was a birthright.

I played in tame creeks 

and wandered fields of broom sedge. 

My scent was dirt and dog fennel. 

I biked through sun showers 

and rode home through rainbows. 

I roamed about my Father’s world 

and Gaia was my guardian –

I heard her whisper

but did not know her name.

I came of age in church basements 

humming Friday night folk songs 

and Sunday morning hymns. 

Brotherhood was my soundtrack 

and peace was a march away. 

I thought we’d change the world 

but The Age of Aquarius was just a song. 

Now it’s half a century since Apollo 8 

witnessed a Christmas Eve Earth-rise. 

I’ve seen fifty springs of Earth Days, 

and fifty years of EPA. 

Fifty years since leaded gas, 

since DDT, since rivers burned.

I watched brown haze lift, 

shad runs recover, bald eagles return. 

I watched the population soar. 

As we broke the land to feed the billions, 

four became eight on the way to twelve.

I watched the temperature creep. 

I saw oceans acidify, glaciers retreat, 

and growing zones stray north. 

I watched the good earth diminish. 

Life hollowed out. On my watch 

a million species winked away. 

Now I hear the whisper of Gaia again – 

her hymns in the trill of insect wings, 

her psalms in the chorus of toads. 

She calls in the song of a mourning dove 

in the still of a summer day. 

She speaks in the shimmering leaves – 

Gentle spirits, persevere, 

for you are the balm of the earth, 

the dawn mist in a withered land. 

Let the fierce engage the fierce 

and let the vicious contend. 

They have their role when troubles come.

But you, beloved, soft as water, 

you are called to be her witness. 
Be still and inherit the earth. 

Earthrise, December 1968, Image by Apollo 8

A Time to Abide

She drifts into cities on fertile winds, 

probes cracks with pollen and spores. 

She settles into soft places.

Sterility offends 

so she seeps through seals,

penetrates pipes and wires. 

She bathes in neon green lagoons. 

In the sludge of industrial waste ponds

she knits new enzymes. 

She sleeps in seed-banks 

beneath the streets of Rio 

and ring-roads of Beijing. 

She breathes the smog of Karachi, 

the dust of Dhaka and Delhi. 

She filters the grit of Mexico City. 

She creeps into slums of São Paulo,

Kolkata, Jakarta, Lagos, Lahore. 

She sinks deep roots. 

She savors Manhattan shadows 

where pavement ants eat pizza crumbs 

and coyotes scavenge epicurean rats. 

On the ragged margins of Midwestern farms 

and pockets of the once-Great Plains, 

in exhausted Southern cotton fields 

and ashes of ancient rain forests 

torched for soy and palm 

she waits. 

As she watches the modern world go down 

beneath the weight of eight billion souls 

she sings to the heart of humanity –

Heal, for time is a balm 

and as long as Sun and Earth endure, 

in the broken ages, Gaia abides. 

Ashes of Amazon Rainforest,
Image by Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images (cropped)

To Heal an Epoch

Do not despair for Earth, beloved. 

    All you know will pass away 

but in the mortal life of Gaia 

    a billion years are yet to be. 

With her a hundred thousand years 

    is as a half a day, 

and a cycle of seasons is just a beat 

    of the pulse that cleanses the world. 

So look to the sea where her cycles reset. 

    Consider the coastal ocean 

where infusion of open sky 

    meets the dissolution of land. 

It happens atom by atom in the vastness

    of a droplet where a thousand algae 

live out their lives basking the paths

    of sunbeams, drawing carbon from the sea.

Out of a thousand, a broken cell settles

    out of the sunlit realm, down through dark

abyssal depths it drifts to oblivion,

    atoms entombed on the ocean floor. 

As seasons crowd the centuries 

    in the stately drift of millennia, 

what happens to microscopic lives 

    clears the air and heals the sea. 

For as sure as aged detrital muck 

    locks carbon into hardened rock; 

as sure as winter’s freeze and thaw 

    and summer squalls carve paths in stone; 

as sure as the Rockies erode to the Plains, 

    sink into seas and rise again; 

as sure as the God of second chances 

    is God of seventy times seven chances – 

Gaia will weave an Eden again. 

Diatoms. Wikipedia image by Prof. Gordon T. Taylor,
Stony Brook University - corp2365, 
NOAA Corps Collection, Public Domain

A Summons

Who will mourn the ‘Age of Man’ 

    when the epoch of Adam is done? 

His dream of dominion has cursed the earth, 

    our sweat has stained the ground. 

We staggered into the Anthropocene 

    where sickness shadows the lands 

and death depletes the seas. 

    When cycles of life are spinning askew 

Gaia cries out for her creatures 

    to tend the afflictions of Earth. 

Listen – set aside your books to hear – 

    she speaks her truths in feral tongues. 

In the howling crown of a wildfire, 

    in the crumbling face of a glacier, 

in the cracking of ice on the Arctic Sea 

    a summons comes to humankind. 

Go make an ark of living earth 

    woven from grasslands, rivers, and trees, 

ten thousand arks across the globe, 

    refugia fit for Gaia. 

Make an ark of the boreal forest, 

    an ark of the chaparral. 

Set aside the high desert, 

   keep the tundra intact. 

Consider each reef a cathedral 

    and every swamp a sanctuary. 

Let lawns revert to meadows 

    and plant a trillion trees 

for a fever flushes the face of Gaia, 

    her time of trials has come. 

Within this age an Eden awaits. 

    In your hands, the seed. 

 Image of Lighthouse, Ribbon Reefs, Great Barrier Reef,
by Richard Ling <wikipedia@rling.com>

On the Idea of Otters

Athens, Georgia
December 21, 2015

Once again I do not see otters 

as I walk my old dog west 

on the loop trail through winter 

woods to shoals and sunset.

I scan the width of gray chop, 

the white froth hugging rocks, 

the slipstreams of submerged 

logs, but all I see is surface 

churn. The sun sets somewhere 

behind layers of gray as I listen 

for the tell-tale chirp. All is quiet 

save the steady shush, so I turn 

back east and follow the brown 

bounce of a hungry dog heading 

toward dinner. Today I missed 

the otters again, though I searched 

with due sincerity. But once on 

an otherwise scripted morning 

in the midst of an unremarkable 

year I watched a romp of river 

puppies swim upstream into fall. 

The sun froze mid-sky as I stood 

on the bank for minutes or hours 

memorizing whiskers and wakes.

Wonders once revealed remain 

hidden. We may glimpse visions.

We may tiptoe into thin terrain, 

but all we keep is absence and 

what spirit haunts an afterglow.

Today I walked an old dog down 

a winter trail to an empty river 

and muffled sunset, and found

they suffice, for I carry the image 

of otters. Ever since their presence 

etched an ordinary day, it’s now 
enough to know they are there.

A Daddy's Wedding Meditation

for Sarah Ambrose and Alan Haxton 

Biggleswade, England, January 17, 2019

Athens, Georgia, June 8, 2019

Are the years so short? We blink 

and decades fly. How nimbly 

the little ones move through our lives 

to catch their world in stride.

            ~

Hers was a world of neighborhood lawns, 

small dogs and swing sets, 

story books strewn on sofas and chairs, 

teddy bears piled in pillow forts.  

It was slippery slides in the summertime, 

long firefly evenings with friends, 

dancing to oldies on Daddy’s arm, 

riding shotgun with Mama out to the farm. 

There were sunny beaches running with cousins, 

tidal flats at island’s end, 

plastic buckets brimming with shells, 

elaborate castles dug in the sand. 

From holding hands while hopping waves 

to body surfing with uncles and aunts 

and twilight strolls along the strand 

under a technicolor sky. 

And those long night drives 

cocooned in the car’s back seat 

hurling up the highway to a house 

bursting with grand-baby love – 

blue silky snuggles on Grandma’s lap, 

going on a bear hunt camped on a couch, 

Grandpa reading on Christmas Eve, 

cookies for Santa next to the tree. 

            ~

Sometimes in unguarded moments 

a daughter’s daddy idly dreams 

about his little girl’s groom-to-be –

what grounds his life today? 

            ~

He was a boy of Bedfordshire, 

child of the gentle English terrain, 

a quiet toddler with dimples and smiles, 

best pals with fur-brother, Buster. 

The sweetest smell of childhood 

was the scent of grease on overalls 

and boiler-room suits worn by his dad.

He hugged those legs every day at the door. 

His husband-potential was praised at four. 

This earnest, curious, nursery-school boy 

grew into comics and colorful jokes 

which he shared for giggles with Mum. 

There were hours of play at the skatepark. 

This youth tattooed with amazing bruises 

manned up enough for a pink guitar, 

strumming riffs in a grunge-rock band.

They hit the road in a family car 

crammed with amps and drums 

and dreams, four gangly teens 

driven to gigs by a mum.

When he ran, he aimed for marathons 

and found his pace in life. 

He became the grown-up go-to kid, 

the one who never lets you down.

            ~

The odds were always astronomical.

A thousand synchronies seemed to converge 

on that ugly-jumper Christmas bash.

Neither came costumed, but he made her laugh 

then assumed the role of ambassador, 

guide to the culture of pub-quiz nights 

and cozy board-game evenings with friends. 

He even ate vegetarian. 

And so they became a couple.

There were pancake dinners in Biggleswade 

and King’s Cross breakfast dates,

goofy humor and, somehow, ducks. 

And those long, loping countryside runs 

through a green English spring 

on small lanes and forest paths 

ending with afternoon tea. 

For her, it took an Englishman 

with dimples, scruff, and easy grin. 

For him, the grace of a big-city girl 

grown out of the college-town South. 

            ~

In this is the founding of households – 

every day to love anew. The old 

will glisten again with the dew, 

the spent and withered will bloom, 

and the love that grounded your childhood, 

the love that united your lives 

will incline your hearts to happiness.

Wherever you dwell will be home.

Photo by David Noah, Watkinsville, GA